The Best School Backpack for High School and College

After loading up five top-rated school backpacks with supplies, gadgets, and books, and living with them for several weeks in the hot and humid New York City summer, we’ve determined that the L.L.Bean Quad Pack is the best school backpack for teenagers and college students. The Quad is a great all-purpose backpack that’s tough and equipped with useful pockets, and it won’t leave you with a too-sweaty back after a walk in the summertime.

Compared with similarly priced competitors, our pick better balances comfort, durability, and versatility. You can find cheaper bags that’ll hold up fine for a few years at school, as well as pricier options that might serve you better on a mountain trail, but the Quad gives you a smart blend of school- and hiking-bag features at a reasonable price. We particularly love its large, zippered exterior pouch, which gives you almost instant access to anything from a light pair of running shoes to a fully packed bag lunch.

If being a student is only your day job and hiking is your passion, you might prefer the pricier The North Face Recon. We also like that the company makes a “women-specific fit” version. Next to the L.L.Bean Quad, the Recon is tougher and water resistant (albeit a touch heavier), and it has a few more fleece-lined pockets that make it a good choice for gadget lovers. While the Recon and Quad offer similar breathability and comfort, the Quad’s pockets are more versatile, and its shoulder straps are softer. If the Quad and Recon were the same price, choosing between the two would be harder, but the Recon tends to cost about $20 more on most days, making the Quad the clear choice for most students.

Doesn’t stand out in performance, design, or comfort, but offers a lot of capacity and organization at an affordable price.

If you just want something to get your school supplies from point A to point B for the least amount of money and you don’t need optimum comfort, the AmazonBasics AB 103 Laptop Backpack might suit your needs. It can hold a full course load’s worth of books, supplies, and electronics for a fraction of the cost of our top picks. And it offers better organization than most backpacks in this price range. Its low price, however, is evident in its loose-fitting laptop sleeve, rough-feeling nylon, and uninspiring aesthetics. And its minimal back-panel and shoulder-strap ventilation isn’t very effective, meaning it’s hotter and less comfortable to use in warm weather than the other packs we tested.

Table of contents

Who this is for

With back-to-school season in full swing, we’ve reevaluated our recommendations for high school and college-age students. Keeping student budgets in mind, as well as an understanding of how someone might use a backpack both in and outside of school, we looked at options under $100 that combined the features of a traditional bookbag and a hiking pack.

They may be different colors, but all these bags have the same basic layout: two main compartments, front pockets, and water-bottle pockets on the sides.

If you look around any high school or college campus, this is by far the most popular type of bag you’ll find, and for good reason: School backpacks of this type can comfortably hold a ton of supplies and books, with room remaining for lunch, a jacket, and water. They also have the organizational and protective features necessary to hold a laptop and all the other electronics a student needs to get through the day.

Not everyone will love this style—it is more functional than fashionable. But if looks are more important to you (or the student you’re shopping for), you might be better served by our guide to our favorite laptop backpacks, which features plenty of options that will satisfy different aesthetic preferences and carrying needs.

Why you should trust us

Reporter Mathew Olson inspecting the interior of the L.L.Bean Quad.

As a recent college graduate and lifetime backpack user, I have a solid understanding of what a modern student looks for in a backpack. Since graduating, I’ve become a public-transit commuter who doesn’t like leaving home without a laptop, an extra layer, a bottle of sunscreen, a book, et cetera. Editor Michael Zhao has been testing backpacks for The Wirecutter since 2012, including helping to relaunch our review of our favorite laptop backpacks. During that time he has personally tested more than 30 bags, in addition to guiding others’ testing.

How we picked

The backpacks I used daily as a college student would inevitably also see use on short hikes and long trips home for the holidays. Taking any bag beyond a regular commute highlights underappreciated strengths and draws attention to shortcomings. On the one hand, a day trip to the mountains might make you appreciate a water-bottle sleeve that can comfortably accommodate a 1-liter bottle. On the other, you might discover that straps that don’t bother you on an average day end up digging into your shoulder blades during a rocky ascent. For people who want a bag that’s great for daily carrying between classes and good for use as a daypack when duty calls, we identified the following key features.

A capacity between 25 and 30 liters: This will accommodate a full course load’s worth of textbooks along with your notebook, pens, and other supplies, while leaving room for a jacket, workout clothes, or snacks. Bags of this size can double as weekenders in a pinch.

A sleeve for laptops 15 inches or larger: It should be more than just a square of loose-hanging fabric sewn to the inside of the bag—the gold standard here is a snug fit with ample padding.

Two water-bottle sleeves: Such sleeves can accommodate anything from a can of soda up to a large bottle for a day hike.

Ergonomic and ventilated back panels and straps: These features should keep your back and shoulders as free of sweat as possible.

Pockets: Useful, sensibly organized pockets will keep your most important items—pens, electronics, chargers, and the like—easy to reach instead of in a pile at the bottom of your bag.

We also wanted our pick to be widely available. You can find smaller companies that make stylish and affordable backpacks, but for this pick we wanted something that’s easy to find online or in stock at your local big-box retailer. Another advantage to top-brand bags is that they often come with an extended warranty. Though we expect that many of the bags we tested will last you several years, warranties certainly don’t hurt.

Despite these backpacks’ popularity, we couldn’t find many editorial reviews of bags of this kind. Those that do exist (like this one at OutdoorGearLab) tend to focus primarily on the bags’ merits as outdoor hiking daypacks as opposed to backpacks for student use. So instead, we chose our testing group mainly by looking at what’s most popular at retailers such as Amazon, eBags, L.L.Bean, and REI. We also checked the comments on the best school supplies guide on our sister site, The Sweethome, for reader suggestions. In the end, we wound up with five backpacks (from four brands) to test.

How we tested

For a good everyday backpack, we knew that our number one question was comfort. We took every bag in the test group on a short walk around Manhattan’s Lower East Side—with the midday sun overhead, temperatures close to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and humidity hovering around 75 percent. We had loaded each bag with 5.5 pounds of books plus a 13-inch MacBook Pro (3.48 pounds) and one water bottle in an external sleeve (a 1-quart bottle, equivalent to 2.275 pounds). After walking for about 1.25 kilometers, we evaluated the comfort level, judging how comfortably the bag sat on the shoulders, both with the straps properly cinched and adjusted and with the pack hanging slightly loose, as well as how sweaty things had gotten under the back panel and straps after we took the pack off. I then spent several weeks—in the midst of the 2016 “heat dome”—using each bag as my daily backpack in turn to see what it was like to live with them for an extended period of time.

We placed the Quad in an inch of water to simulate setting it down in a puddle.

Another concern we addressed in testing was weatherproofing. None of the bags we tested claim to be waterproof, but you still hope that a daily-use bag will keep your cargo dry in a brush with the elements. We decided to test with what might constitute a worst-case scenario: getting the bottom of the bag wet. We placed each bag in a bathtub, standing it upright in an inch of water, with a plain cotton garment sitting at the bottom of the main compartment. After waiting 10 minutes, we removed the bags from the water and checked the garments for dryness.

Our pick

Great breathability and a large variety of pockets make it great for schlepping books and electronics. It’s also big enough to work as a weekender.

Offering versatility at an appealing price, the L.L.Bean Quad Pack is a great backpack for taking to class, bringing on a walk through the park, or carrying on a day trip on the trails. First and foremost, the Quad is exceptionally comfortable even when loaded up in warm weather. It’s spacious, capable of carrying a lot in its sensibly organized pockets. The Quad also boasts a unique outer pouch that can be the only storage you need for a short outing. On L.L.Bean’s site the Quad has great reviews from high schoolers, hikers, law-school students, and archaeologists alike. It isn’t a revolutionary bag, but for this price, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a backpack as thoughtfully designed.

The Quad (right) has a notably breathable back panel and soft, supportive shoulder straps. The Recon (left) uses a more complex design to achieve similar results.

The Quad matched or beat every other backpack we tested in comfort and breathability. Its straps and back panel rest nicely on your body whether the bag is loaded up with books and electronics or holding only an extra layer and some water. No bag will keep you sweat-free on a muggy summer day, but the Quad’s turtle-shell-patterned back panel and perforated foam shoulder straps put up a decent fight. This design lets air flow between your shirt and the bag, and the straps allow heat to escape from your shoulders and chest. The Quad also offers a waist belt to help with toting heavier loads; if you’re not on a hike, or if you simply dislike having waist straps dangling off your back, you can stow them into a little compartment behind the back panel. And in our tests, the Quad was by far the most comfortable backpack to carry by its top handle, which has a nice, smooth finish and feels sturdily stitched into the bag.

You can access the Quad’s laptop compartment without opening the main compartment.

With a capacity of 33 liters, the Quad holds a lot for a school pack—even the arguably more adventure-ready Recon from The North Face tops out at 31 liters. You could easily carry two laptops in this bag. It allows you to access the laptop storage sleeve without opening the main compartment; a side zipper lets you get at your computer from the back of the bag. This design is convenient for getting through TSA checkpoints. The sleeve itself is well-padded front and back but doesn’t suspend the laptop above the very bottom of the bag. Inside the main compartment you’ll find another padded and partially elastic sleeve that’s designed for use with a hydration bladder when you’re hiking, but it also works well for a laptop or tablet. This sleeve is mounted a good 2 or 3 inches above the bag’s bottom, so the laptop will be cushioned by the bag (and any soft item wedged beneath it) in the event of a drop. If you use the inner sleeve for your laptop, that leaves the nicely padded side-zipper sleeve available for larger books or perhaps important folders. Basically, it seems like a nice place to keep flat items separate from the other contents of the bag.

The Quad’s organizer holds a lot of stuff and keeps everything neat.

In the middle compartment of the Quad, you have three notebook/tablet-sized sleeves stacked on top of one another, along with an organizer for pens, pencils, and such—though students who regularly carry specialized tools or art supplies might consider getting a separate container they can slide in and out of their pack. Flanking the Quad’s organizing compartment are two fleece-lined pockets, one top-zip and one side-zip. These pockets are a good fit for small electronics or sunglasses that could use a little extra protection. You’ll also find a tiny, outer-facing side-zip nylon pocket that’s perfect for an umbrella.

The Quad has a a lot of additional storage on the front, including a flap-closure external pouch that keeps things easily accessible.

The most interesting feature of the Quad is the large outer pouch on its front, which is more versatile than similar pockets on other bags. It has a buckle-secured top flap and zips along the side. With the zipper open and the buckle unlatched, you can spread the pocket almost completely open. It can easily fit a light jacket, a book, and a pair of headphones, and still have enough room for you to squeeze a small lunch container inside. You could also store sweaty gym clothes in this compartment (so they don’t stink up your notebooks in the main compartment). The North Face Recon’s external pouch is similar but less versatile since it can’t close completely. You could squeeze some slim running shoes into the Quad’s pocket, but with the Recon, even the slimmest pair would stick out of the top.

The Quad’s build quality is superb, and we doubt you’ll run into any issues, but if you do, L.L.Bean products carry a 100 percent customer satisfaction guarantee, and the company has a famously tolerant return policy.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Quad did come up a little short in our water test. L.L.Bean’s website lists the Quad as having 1,000-denier nylon along the bottom, which is about the same weight you’d find on midgrade luggage. However, our test garment still came out damp after the Quad’s 10-minute soak, whereas the Patagonia Refugio kept the garment almost bone-dry thanks to its water-resistant finish. While we’d prefer to see the Quad have such a treatment, the absence of it isn’t a big deal—just try to stay out of puddles.

And this is picking nits, but a 33-liter capacity is borderline too big for a school backpack. If you give someone the space, they’re wont to use it, which can lead to overpacking. But in practice, the Quad didn’t feel bigger than the other bags we tested. This would have been a problem with this year’s version of The North Face’s Surge, which at 40 liters is squarely in carry-on travel backpack territory.

The Recon, from The North Face, is about as comfortable as the Quad and designed with similar organization features. But it typically sells for about $100, making it the most expensive bag we tested. To its credit, this backpack feels the most durable of the group—the bottom is particularly tough and water resistant. But it’s also heavier (2 pounds, 10 ounces versus the 2 pounds, 3 ounces of the L.L.Bean Quad). The one major advantage of the Recon over the Quad is its abundance of fleece-lined organizer pockets. If I carried a number of small electronics with me daily, and the Recon was on sale for $80 or less, I might purchase it over the Quad. We also like that the Recon comes in a “women-specific fit” version with straps and back paneling that The North Face claims to have optimized for women’s bodies—but the L.L.Bean Quad’s unisex design works well enough, and it’s the better buy for most students.

The Recon has many fleece-lined pockets throughout, including this one at the top—perfect for sunglasses or a USB battery pack.

The Recon is almost as comfortable as our top pick. The ventilated back panel is breathable, as are the injection-molded shoulder straps. But the straps feel unnecessarily thick and rubbery stiff—a more flexible foam would’ve been more accommodating of different body shapes and sizes. The bag has a partial-mesh outer pouch into which you can easily throw things you don’t mind getting wet, but unlike the Quad’s outer pouch, it can’t fully close, so it isn’t as useful.

Overall, the Recon is built more for the hiking enthusiast who also needs to carry books and a laptop on the weekdays. Accordingly, the Recon includes details such as an embedded emergency whistle in the sternum buckle, and it has spectacular reviews on REI’s website. If you’re more outdoorsy, consider getting the Recon for the sake of its tougher construction. Like L.L.Bean, The North Face offers a lifetime warranty and tends to be good about fixing wear-and-tear issues, even if those aren’t technically covered, so your Recon should stay well protected.

Budget pick

Doesn’t stand out in performance, design, or comfort, but offers a lot of capacity and organization at an affordable price.

Looking for a functional bag at a bargain price? The AmazonBasics AB 103 Laptop Backpack is a decent deal at less than half the price of the Quad. It offers a good variety of organizing pockets in different sizes, plus a second sleeve attached to the laptop sleeve, a nice spot for a tablet or folders. But it’s a bit of a bore aesthetically, and the lower price is evident in its rough nylon and its little touches—or lack thereof.

The lower material quality of the AmazonBasics bag (right) is immediately evident in direct comparison with our other picks.

First and foremost, the 17-inch laptop sleeve is decently padded but is so wide that almost any modern laptop you put in it will swim around—you’ll definitely need a separate laptop sleeve to go with it. The heavy padding on the back panel and straps isn’t uncomfortable to walk with, but the construction basically hugs your frame, making this bag the most sweat-encouraging of the backpacks we tested. The wide-holed mesh of the water-bottle pockets is prone to snagging, too, so stay away from trails if you can.

It’s not all bad, though. The handle is wider and more comfortable in comparison with that of the more basic 15-inch-laptop AmazonBasics backpack we tested last year. That, combined with this design’s better array of pockets and less boxy shape, makes it worth the extra money.

Like all AmazonBasics products, it carries a one-year warranty. And it’s built well enough that we think it should last a bit longer than that. It seems likely to wear out before either of our other picks, however. At the end of the day, it’s a serviceable bag for budget-minded students, but we’d leave it at home before a hike.

The competition

We also tested another L.L.Bean offering, the Digital Organizer Pack, and found it far less impressive than the Quad. The selling point of the Digital Organizer Pack is its large 17-inch laptop sleeve and accompanying tablet sleeve—beyond those features, not much sets it apart as a tech-oriented bag. Absent are the Quad’s unique organizing pockets, and construction-wise, the Digital Organizer’s straps and back panel feel cheaper and less breathable. At the same list price, you’re better off with the Quad.

The Patagonia Refugio is a decently comfortable backpack with some particular weaknesses. You could easily mistake this bag’s laptop sleeve for its main compartment, as it hangs loosely toward the other inner compartments. The laptop sleeve is sewn about an inch above the bag’s bottom to offer protection in the event of a fall, but if you haven’t packed the Refugio to the brim, your electronics are sure to jostle. This backpack has only two organizing sleeves and a couple of slots for pens. On the bright side, it fared particularly well in our water test—the treatment applied to the bag’s fabric kept our packed garment bone-dry, and the Refugio was the quickest backpack to dry out.

We were looking forward to testing this year’s version of last year’s pick, the Surge from The North Face. But the company seems to have changed that model’s intended purpose. Previous Surge models have been aimed at tech-inclined commuters and students, but the new Surge Transit’s 40-liter capacity makes it a travel backpack more than anything else. For most people, it’s far too big for daily use.

We also considered testing the JanSport Agave, because its $70 price (at the time we checked) put it somewhere between the low-end AmazonBasics AB 103 and the midrange L.L.Bean Quad, but we ended up deciding that it didn’t offer enough to sway anyone in either direction. With an unsculpted back panel, it seems as if it would run much hotter than the Quad—it’s similar in design to the L.L.Bean Digital Organizer—and its higher material quality makes it much costlier than the AmazonBasics bag. It also lacks the external pouch of the Quad and Recon, opting instead for a daisy chain. We think a pouch is more useful.

On the lower end, the 15-inch-laptop AmazonBasics AB 102 Laptop Backpack we tested last year doesn’t hold up against the 17-inch version. It has even less going for it aesthetically, offers an inferior handle, and provides fewer organizational features. And it cost only $7 less at the time we checked. We’d pay the extra dollars for the 17-inch version every time.

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